contribsys/einhorn

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

1646 stars · 47 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-30, confidence not recorded

Einhorn is a language-independent shared socket manager that runs and supervises multiple copies of a long-lived process, opening server sockets in the master process and passing them to workers via file descriptors. It supports seamless code reloading, dynamic reconfiguration, and control through an interactive shell (einhornsh).

Use cases

• run multiple worker copies of a server sharing one listening socket
• zero-downtime code reload for a long-running process
• manage a language-agnostic daemon without rewriting it in a specific framework
• pass pre-bound socket file descriptors to worker processes via environment variables
• dynamically reconfigure a running master process over a command socket
• keep a service alive with automatic worker respawning

When to choose

• you need shared-socket process supervision that works with any language or framework
• you want seamless reloads without dropping in-flight connections
• you prefer a lightweight gem over a full init system or container orchestrator

When to avoid

• you already use systemd socket activation or a container orchestrator with equivalent features
• you need Windows support
• you want a full application server with built-in worker management for a specific framework

Facets

cli-tool · maturity maintenance

networking concurrency deployment developer-tools backend infrastructure-as-code microservices cli ruby process-manager shared-sockets zero-downtime-reload language-agnostic worker-processes graceful-restart devops linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="contribsys/einhorn")